Forthcoming Articles

Family Planning

by

LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2017

DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846733-0194

Introduction

Family planning, as defined by contemporary institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), refers to the range of techniques through which a couple decides the number of children to have, if any, and how to plan or schedule a woman’s pregnancies. American and European women’s reproductive health advocates—most famously the American activist Margaret Sanger—coined the phrase “family planning” in the 1930s to bring together the concerns of multiple constituencies, including Malthusians who feared the effects of population growth, and advocates of women’s reproductive freedom and health. As a global movement, “family planning” consists of networks of institutions, funds, and the dissemination of new kinds of contraceptive technology. The modern family planning movement, which links spatially broad demographic goals with women’s reproductive lives, emerged in Africa in the colonial era through the efforts of a range of actors, including missionaries, European colonial administrators, and medical professionals. Many of the early family planning clinics in Africa were voluntary dues-paying organizations. By the late 1960s, many family planning clinics were incorporated into a global network of IPPF affiliate branches and African government health systems, with support from international donor organizations, including the Pathfinder Fund, the Population Council, and USAID. Yet family planning in Africa is not simply the wholesale importation of a concept envisioned by Margaret Sanger in 1930s Brooklyn into African contexts. For one thing, as the historian Megan Vaughan has argued, “the family” is not a static or uniform concept, but has changed over time and across cultural and historical contexts, and as such, “family planning” does not unfold in a uniform way across the globe. Moreover, while international development organizations define family planning as having two goals—spacing and timing pregnancies, and limiting the number of children in a family—many Africans value the former and not the latter. As the anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe has demonstrated, many African women use biomedical contraception with the goal of having larger, rather than smaller, families. Understanding the history and meaning of “family planning” in Africa requires an awareness of a broader cultural, geographical, and historical context. We might ask certain questions in this regard: How have African communities conceptualized identities in relation to fertility and childbirth, and how do these intellectual traditions affect how African women use, or respond to, modern family planning initiatives? How has the history of colonial occupation shaped African responses to family planning initiatives? Why, in much of Africa, has the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy not resulted in families desiring fewer children, as it has in other parts of the world? A history of the modern family planning movement in Africa must include both modern global histories of Africa’s relationship to the world through colonialism and capitalism, and longue durée histories of motherhood, health, and fertility in Africa.

Published by the Population Council, Population and Development Review publishes articles related to the theme of population, with particular attention to how it relates to environmental issues and economic development.